The thousand of "dun Gorg"” “

A Christmas crib in each family. A Christmas procession is held in each parish in Malta and Gozo in the days immediately preceding Christmas: “boys and girls, singing carols, accompany the Child Jesus to their own parish church with torches and banners in a particularly evocative atmosphere, a combination of festivity and prayer”. The balconies of the houses facing onto the streets through which the torchlight procession winds its way are adorned with Christmas decorations and lights. “At the end of the procession a little crib is presented to each child, so that no family may be without this important symbol of our faith”. That’s how Christmas in Malta is described to SirEurope by Msgr. Lorenzo Gatt, ecclesiastical assistant of the Society for Christian Doctrine, better known as Museum, acronym for “Magister, utinam sequantur evangelium universus mundus” (“Master, may the whole world follow the gospel”), founded in Malta in 1907 by Father Giorgio Preca, proclaimed Blessed on 9 May 2001. It was Father Preca “who decided in 1921 that his Society should organize this event in each parish on the island on Christmas Eve each year”. Precursor of the Council. Born in 1880, Father Preca died in 1962, on the eve of the opening of Vatican Council II. “A pioneer of the apostolate of the laity”, he clearly intuited, fifty years before this historic event, “the importance of the laity’s contribution to the Church’s evangelising mission”, explains Monsignor Gatt. Convinced that “the teaching of the catechism, hitherto exclusively assigned to priests, could also be delegated to suitably prepared lay people”, the Blessed decided to “popularise” this mission. In 1907, a year after having been ordained priest, don Preca, known confidentially as “dun Gorg”, gathered round him a group of twenty-year-olds in whom he instilled the zeal for evangelising those in their own age group: this was the seed of the future Society of Christian Doctrine which took its first steps amid a good deal of suspicion and misunderstanding, even on the part of the Curia. And it was, paradoxically, the founder himself who inspired them with an original apostolate conducted also in the taverns and the many dockyards of the island. The Society of Christian Doctrine. The Society now has roughly a thousand members, 550 men and 420 women who – Monsignor Gatt explains – “though living with their own families and carrying out a normal working life, choose celibacy and dedicate themselves to teaching in the schools of catechism of Malta and Gozo, as well as abroad. The Society is present in every parish in the Maltese archipelago, with a centre for men and another for women (120 in all). It also runs a secondary school”. The Society’s first house was founded in Australia in 1952. Now there are altogether twelve there, distributed between Melbourne, Sidney and various parishes in Tasmania. Museum has also been established in London for fifteen years. In the 1980s it inaugurated its own missions in Kenya and in Sudan where it runs the Comboni School in the diocese of El-Obeid. The lack of catechetical texts written in Maltese prompted Father Preca to promote the translation of the Bible into the local language and to write a hundred or so publications of his own to diffuse knowledge of and devotion to the mystery of the incarnation. Today the motherhouse at Blata l-Bajda (Malta) is equipped with its own printing works and publishes various religious texts. The Preca Library, the island’s main Catholic bookshop, in collaboration with some foreign publishing houses, recently published an illustrated Bible for children. Attention to the young still bulks large in the Society’s work: “In the seminaries – notes Msgr. Gatt – over half the new vocations come from the ranks of the Society in whose male branch there are now some 250 youths aged from 18 to 34”. Giovanna Pasqualin Traversa